M. Halstead

Welcome

Welcome to my small corner of the internet. This is my personal website where I post my art, zines, and information about my recent published writing.

I also keep a blog which has RSS enabled— more info about how to subscribe is on the blog homepage.

I am a graphic designer with a lot of hobbies. My main interests are horror fiction, which is evidenced by my published writing and which I write about some on my blog; art, specifically zinemaking and printmaking; and HEMA, aka historical swordsmanship, which I don't talk about much here (it's an in-person kind of thing, for me).

I'm working on getting away from social media entirely, so I'm not elsewhere on the internet. I am agender, or gender ambivalent, as far as I've thought about it, and you can use any pronouns you want when referring to me.

Thanks for visiting!

Latest Goings-On

Latest Zine

Badgers in the Office

Zine cover with an illustration of five badgers and the title If There's a Family of Badgers

An image of badgers in a closet and the text Living in a supply closet in our office.

A badger bothering an accountant with a grumpy looking executive behind her desk and the text And the company refuses to do anything about it.

A badger working at a laptop and the text Since they insist it's the exterminator's job

An exterminator being threatened by a badger with the text And the exterminator says they don't handle badgers

Employees in the closet from the second page and the text What should we as employees do?

The badgers doing general office activities with the text We are scared of the badgers.

Back cover of the zine with the link to the Ask A Manager post and my website

Latest Print

Externalize #1

This is my most recent and most personal of the prints on this page. Since it's the most personal, it's a little hard to say too much about it; on the one hand it is too close to my heart (ha!) and on the other I think art should stand for itself, without too much input from the creator. For now, at least, I'll let it stand on its own.

I decided to make two versions of this print, both in limited editions. First is the main print, of which there are 25, which is printed on Japanese Shoji Paper (6x9"). The second is a small run of 10 postcards (4x6").

Latest Published Work

"Deathbed"

Up the stairs, take a left, go around the corner, and enter the second blue door: that’s me. I have a narrow window, which is my greatest luxury, but besides that, I am like all the other cells in this prison. White cinder block walls bear down on the platform bed with a sagging mattress, and the smell of sweat and shit and disinfectant seeps through the door gaps. Over the years, many people have watched the sun rise and set through my window, waiting for the day when I would finish feeding, and they would be bundled out, led down the stairs and into the brown brick room where they would meet their end.

"Deathbed", in which a death row cell recounts its memories of the inhabitants it has housed over the years, was first published in 2024 in Howls from the Scene of the Crime edited by Timaeus Bloom and Jessica Peter. You can purchase the anthology on Bookshop.org, Amazon, or wherever you usually buy books.

Latest Changes

Goals (in no particular order)

Develop a dark mode and ability to toggle between light/dark
Improve mobile functioning
Build a separate graphic design portfolio
Join a webring? or two?
Add blog directory
Create a background image for flavor
Add more buttons and visual flavor to break up text

Change Log

Oct 17 2024: Switched to custom domain (mhalstead.com). I am also trying to get some better mobile responsiveness here and it's taking some trial and error.

Oct 10 2024: Front page - changed introduction text and added some more info to the about me section; added "latest" boxes, for recent projects; added this changelog :P Adjusted styling on the scroll boxes (site-wide).

Oct 09 2024: Added stylesheet, updated all pages to link to stylesheet. Added scroll boxes on the zine page. More back-end stuff, specifically adjusting the hierarchy of the blog pages (moved individual blog post pages into year and month folders, changed blog home page to an index page in its own folder).